As for the man who'd initiated this orgy, he came several times, and went, leaving the couplings to continue until closing time. Several people claimed he spoke to them, though he said nothing. One claimed they knew him to be a sometime porn star who'd retired from the business and moved to Oregon. He'd returned to his old hunting grounds, this account went, for sentimental reasons, only to vanish again into the wilderness that always claims the sexual professional.

One part of this was certainly true. The man vanished and did not return, though every one of the thirty patrons that night came back, crabs and gonorrhoea not withstanding, within the next few days (most of them the next night) in the hope of seeing him again. When he did not appear, a few then made it their private mission to discover him in some other watering-hole, but a man seen by the yellowing light of a dim lamp in a secret place is not easily identified elsewhere. The more they thought about him and talked about him, the less clear the memory of him became, so that a week after the event, no two witnesses could have readily agreed on any of his personal details.

And as for the man himself, he could not remember the events of the night clearly, and thanked God for the fact.

iii

Drew had fled back home after the encounter on the stairs, and ferreting out the pack of cigarettes he kept for emergencies (though God knows he'd never anticipated an emergency quite like this) he'd sat down and smoked himself giddy while he thought about what he'd just experienced. Tears came, now and then, and a fit of trembling so violent he had to sit with his knees drawn up underneath his chin until it passed. It was no use, he knew, trying to make a sane appraisal of what had happened until tomorrow, for a very good reason: before setting out for Will's house, he'd dropped what he'd thought was a tab of Ecstasy, just to ease him into a more sensual mood. At the beginning of the evening, before the drug had kicked in, he'd felt slightly guilty about not telling Will what he'd done; but he'd been so careful to present himself as a man whose drug days were behind him that he feared the date would sour if he told the truth. Then the Ecstasy had started to mellow him out, and the guilt had vanished, along with any need to expunge it.So what had gone wrong? Something venomous in the tablet had turned round and bitten him, no doubt of that. He'd had a bad trip of some kind. But that wasn't the whole answer; at least that's what his instincts told him. He'd had bad trips before, a goodly number. He'd seen walls soften, bugs burst, clothes take flight. This delusion had been qualitatively different in a fashion he presently had no words to describe. Tomorrow maybe, he'd be able to articulate how it had seemed to him Will had been a conspirator with the venom in his system, feeding the madness in Drew's veins with an insanity all of his own. And tomorrow maybe he'd also understand why when the man he'd just made love to had come out of the bedroom, his head low, his body running with sweat, there had been a moment (no, more than a moment) when Will's face had seemed to smear, his eyes losing all trace of white, his teeth becoming sharp as nails. Why, in short, the man had lost all semblance of humanity and become - for a few heartbeats, something bestial. Too wild to be a dog, too shy to be a wolf; he'd looked, just for a moment, like a fox, yelping with laughter as he came to do mischief.

i

Hugo had never been a sentimentalist. It was one of the bounden duties of a philosopher, he'd always contended, to eschew the mask of cheaply-gained emotion, and find a purer place, where reality might be studied and assessed without the prejudice of feeling. That was not to say he was not weak, at times. When Eleanor had left him, twelve years ago now, he had found himself susceptible to all manner of clap-trap that would have left him untouched at any other time. He'd become acutely aware of how much popular culture promoted yearning: songs of love and loss on the radio, tales of tragic mismatches on the soaps he'd catch Adele watching in the afternoon. Even some of his own peers had turned their attentions to such trivialities; men and women of his own age and reputation studying the semiotics of romance. It appalled him to see these phenomena, and sickened him that he himself was prone to their blandishments. It had made him doubly harden his heart against his estranged wife. When she'd asked for a reconciliation the following January (she'd left him in July) he had refused it with a loathing that was fuelled in no small part by a repugnance at his own frailty. The love songs had left their scars, and he hated himself for it. He would never be that vulnerable again.

But memory still conspired against reason. When every year towards the end of August the first intimations of autumn appeared - a chill at twilight, and the smoky smell in the air - he would remember how it had been with Eleanor at the best of times. How proud he'd been to have her at his side; how happy to see their partnership fruitful: to be a father of sons who would, he'd thought, grow up to idolize him. They had sat together, he and Eleanor, for evening after evening in those early years, planning their lives. How he would get a chair at one of the more prestigious universities and lecture a couple of days a week while he wrote the books by which he would change the course of Western thought. Meanwhile, she would raise their sons, then - once the children were independent spirits (which would be quickly, given that they had such self-willed parents) - she would return to her own field of interest, which was genealogy. She too would write a book, very probably, and garner her share of the limelight.

That had been the dream. Then, of course, Nathaniel had been killed, and the whole prospectus had become nonsense overnight. Eleanor's nerves, which had never been good, started to require higher and higher doses of medication; the books Hugo had planned to write refused to find their way out of his head and onto the page. And the move from Manchester - which had seemed an eminently rational decision at the time - had brought its own crop of troubles. That first autumn had been the nadir, no doubt. Though there had been plenty of bad times later, it had been the insanities of that October and November that had scoured him of his former optimism. Nathaniel, in whom the virtues of the parents (Eleanor's compassion and physical grace, Hugo's robust pragmatism and cleaving to truth) had been wed, was gone. Will meanwhile, had become a mischief-maker, his pranks and his secretiveness only reinforcing Eleanor's belief that the best had gone from the world, so there was no harm sedating herself into a stupor.

Grim memories, all of them. And yet when he thought of Eleanor (and he often did), the sentimental songs had their way with him still, and he would feel that old yearning in his throat and belly. It wasn't that he wanted her back (he'd made new arrangements since then, and they worked well enough in their unromantic way) but that the years he'd had with her - good, bad and indifferent - had passed into history, and when he conjured her face in his mind's eye he conjured a golden age, when it had still seemed possible to achieve something important. He yearned then, despite himself. Not for the woman or for the life he'd lived with her, and certainly not for the son who'd survived, but for the Hugo who had still been self-possessed enough to believe in his own significance.

Too late now. He would not change the world of thought with a brilliantly argued thesis. He could not even change the expressions on the faces of the students who sat before him at his lectures: slack-faced young dullards whom he could not remotely inspire, and so now no longer tried. He had ceased to read the work of his peers - most of it was masturbatory rubbish anyway - and the books that had once been his personal bibles, particularly Heidegger and Wittgenstein, languished unstudied. He had exhausted them. Or, more probably, exhausted his interaction with them. It was not that they had nothing left to teach him, but that he had no interest left in learning. Philosophy had not made him one jot happier. Like so much of his life, it was a thing that had seemed to offer value - a repository of meaning and enlightenment that had proved to be utterly empty.